"Poetry keeps clean the tools of thought."
-T.S. Eliot
Poetry can help us think strategically. A poem is thought, experience, and emotion distilled into a tightly controlled form that uses words, images, sound, and rhythm patterns to create a complex set of meanings that constantly form and reform themselves. A poem's components take it beyond argument into a realm where expectations of a single analyzable meaning are deliberately questioned and subverted.
All art does this, but poetry does it in a particularly condensed and therefore intensive way. A poem is a puzzle with multiple, inexhaustible, coexistent, and interchangeable "solutions"—each more or less dependent on the others for validity.
The desire for closure (which drives most business considerations) and the desire to pursue the shortest route between A and B won't get us anywhere at all when we're faced with a poem. Business leaders too often develop their abilities in quantitative, linear thinking at the expense of nonquantitative response. Reading poetry encourages a fresh focus on these emotional, contextual, and cultural issues. It also requires that one enjoy the experience of poetry and want to become an astute reader. But the skill can be learned and, once acquired, should be transferable, for example, to responding to complex, strategic situations.
Reading poetry encourages a fresh focus on these emotional, contextual, and cultural issues.
Publications on Metaphorical Thinking
Poetry in the Boardroom
This roundtable discussion sets out the ideas developed by Clare Morgan, a professor of English literature and creative writing at the University of Oxford, that emerged from an investigation conducted by the Strategy Institute on the relationship between reading poetry and strategic thinking.
"Poetry in the Boardroom: Thinking Beyond the Facts: A Roundtable Discussion among Clare Morgan, Kirsten Lange, Ted Buswick, and Nancy Healy," Journal of Business Strategy 26 (January-February 2005), pp. 34-40.